Businesses need to protect their assets when they are within their protective infrastructure AND when they are actively exposed or placed within the unprotected external world. The tools and procedures needed to protect the internal assets are different from the ones that protect the assets when they leave the confines of the secured network.
I remember when I first learned about Web application firewall technology. It seemed like magic to me: A device that could compensate for bad coding or unexpected/unintended web application functionality. It could do this by learning expected application behavior and then enforcing said behavior, even if the application itself was capable of allowing the unwanted behavior. The business case for such a technology is easily recognizable even more so today than it was in the mid- to early 2000’s when it first came out: the ability to have a device compensate for human error.
Today, many organizations are now realizing that DDoS defense is critical to maintaining an exceptional customer experience. Why? Because nothing diminishes load times or impacts the end users’ experience more than a cyber-attack, which is the silent killer of application performance.
As high-availability and high performance distributors of content to end-users, CDNs can serve as a lynchpin in the customer experience. Yet new vulnerabilities in CDN networks have left many wondering if the CDNs themselves are vulnerable to a wide variety of cyber-attacks, such as forward loop assaults.
So what types of attacks are CDNs vulnerable too? Here are top 5 cyber threats that threaten CDNs so you can safeguard against them.
Attackers have learned that a significant blind spot in CDN services are the treatment of dynamic content requests. Since the dynamic content is not stored on CDN servers, all the requests for dynamic content are sent to the origin’s servers. Attackers are taking advantage of this behavior and they generate attack traffic that contains random parameters in the HTTP GET requests. CDN servers immediately redirect this attack traffic to the origin, expecting the origin’s server to handle the requests. But, in many cases, the origin’s servers do not have the capacity to handle all those attack requests and they fail to provide online services to legitimate users, creating a denial-of-service situation.
Many CDNs have the ability to limit the number of dynamic requests to the server under attack. This means that they cannot distinguish attackers from legitimate users and the rate limit will result in legitimate users being blocked.
SSL-based DDoS attacks target the secured online services of the victim. These attacks are easy to launch and difficult to mitigate, making them attackers’ favorites. In order to detect and mitigate DDoS SSL attacks, CDN servers must first decrypt the traffic using the customer’s SSL keys. If the customer is not willing to provide the SSL keys to its CDN provider, then the SSL attack traffic is redirected to the customer’s origin, leaving the customer vulnerable to SSL attacks. SSL attacks that hit the customer’s origin can easily take down the secured online service.
During DDoS attacks when WAF technologies are involved, CDN networks also have a significant weakness in terms of the number of SSL connections per second from a scalability capability, and serious latency issues can arise.
[You might also like: WAF and DDoS – Perfect Bedfellows: Every Business Owner Must Read.]
PCI and other security compliance issues are also a problem as sometimes this limits the data centers that are able to be used to service the customer, as not all CDN providers are PCI compliant across all datacenters. This can again increase latency and cause audit issues.
CDN services are often offered only for HTTP/S and DNS applications. Other online services and applications in the customer’s data center such as VoIP, mail, FTP and proprietary protocols are not served by the CDN and therefore traffic to those applications is not routed through the CDN. In addition, many web-based applications are also not served by CDNs. Attackers are taking advantage of this blind spot and launch attacks on applications that are not routed through the CDN, hitting the customer origin with largescale attacks that threaten to saturate the Internet pipe of the customer. Once the Internet pipe is saturated, all the applications at the customer’s origin become unavailable to legitimate users, including the ones that are served by the CDN.
Even applications that are serviced by a CDN can be attacked once the attackers launch a direct attack on the IP address of the web servers at the customer origin. These can be network based floods such as UDP floods or ICMP floods that will not be routed through CDN services, and will directly hit the servers of the customer at the origin. Such volumetric network attacks can saturate the internet pipe, resulting in taking down all the applications and the online services of the origin, including the ones that are served by the CDN. Often misconfiguration of “shielding” the data center can leave the applications directly vulnerable to attack.
CDN protection for web applications threats is limited and exposes the web applications of the customer to data leakage, data thefts and other threats that are common with web applications. Most CDN-based web application firewall capabilities are minimal, covering only a basic set of predefined signatures and rules. Many of the CDN-based WAFs do not learn HTTP parameters, do not create positive security rules and therefore it cannot protect from zero day attacks and known threats. For the companies that DO provide tuning for the web applications in their WAF, the cost is extremely high to get this level of protection.
In addition to the significant blind spots identified earlier, most CDN security services are not responsive enough, resulting in security configurations that take hours to manually deploy and to spread across all its network servers. The security services are using outdated technology such as rate limit that was proven to be inefficient during the last attack campaigns, and it lacks capabilities such as network behavioral analysis, challenge – response mechanisms and more.
Among the reasons to marry DDoS & WAF (web application firewall) together, beyond a single pane of glass, beyond single vendor and quick technical response, and higher quality detection and mitigation – it makes sound business sense. Today, a good number of companies have developed the understanding that DDoS defense is critical to maintaining an exceptional customer experience (CX). Because of the extremely competitive nature of business these days, we are seeing more companies make the investments into digital transformation and customer experience. According to Gartner, customer experience is the new king.
Radware’s Pascal Geenens walks us through 10 questions regarding the cyber security threat landscape, trends in the Darknet, motivations for attacks, and much more.
Data is the currency of today’s digital economy, the oil of the 21st century. Personal data is considered our economical asset generated by our identities and our behavior and we trade it for higher quality services and products. Online platforms act as intermediaries in a two-sided market collecting data from consumers and selling advertising slots to companies. In exchange for our data being collected, we get what appears to be a free service.
The growth and the market capitalization of social platform providers like Facebook and search engines such as Google demonstrate the value of personal data. Personal data also provides new ways to monetize services as news organizations are finding it difficult to charge ‘real’ money for digital news, but leverage our willingness to pay for a selection of ‘free’ news with our personal data. Every 3 out of 4 persons prefer free registration with selective access over a paid registration with full access.
In retail marketing, companies often try to add value to a product with the addition of extra items that are discounted or free. In the words of one of the infomercial kings, Ron Popeil, ‘But wait, there’s more!’. While I may have been originally interested in a set of Ginsu knives, the bonus vegetable dicer sealed the deal.
As the saying goes in the real world, “necessity is the mother of invention.” However, those of us that work in the technology sector know that this isn’t always the starting point or source in our arena. There are volumes of cautionary tales and vast, virtual graveyards of “products looking for a problem to solve.” Often, these come about when vendors look across their technology portfolio and identify logical interactions that only they can see. Other times they occur through overzealous business development efforts, a sort of unfortunate “you got your chocolate in my peanut butter” scenario where the result tastes anything but sweet.
Organizations can protect themselves against advanced threats by adopting the right strategy. This strategy involves getting the right players on the field, with a complementary set of skills that will provide a team with the right mix of capabilities. In deploying security products into your IT environment, you are looking for the right mix of solutions (security monitoring, protection, analysis, analytics and response capabilities) in order to cover the field. Deploying an effective and efficient set of security solutions will provide you maximum benefits, with improved operational efficiencies and costs.
Airlines, retailers, travel service providers, banks, marketplaces, and social media – all rely on their web applications to generate revenues or facilitate productivity. They typically develop and maintain their own web applications which are tailored for their business needs. To support the growing needs of their online presence, they are adopting agile development practices also known as DevOps and Continuous Deployment.
